Chapter 18 · 13 min read

Protecting Children from AI Risks

Parent Perspective · Greta, mother of two daughters, ages 11 and 14. "I Went from Panicking to Informed"

"I found out about it from another mum at school pickup. Her daughter had shared a selfie in a WhatsApp group and within a week someone had used an AI tool to generate manipulated images from it. We're talking about a fourteen-year-old. My first instinct was to take every device out of the house. My second instinct was to ring my sister, who works in tech, and ask her what we were actually dealing with. She talked me off the ledge, but she also gave me something I didn't have before: a clear picture of exactly what the risks are and what actually works to protect against them. That conversation changed how I parent around technology. I went from panicking to informed. And informed, it turns out, is a much better place to parent from."

Chapter 17 covered the worries that bring most parents to this material. This chapter is the taxonomic counterpart: what the harms actually are, and what to do about each one.

There's a version of this chapter that would make you put the book down. It would detail every emerging threat in graphic terms, stack horror story on top of horror story, and leave you convinced that the only safe option is to disconnect your children from technology entirely and move somewhere without Wi-Fi.

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In this chapter

1The Five Categories of AI Risk for Children
2Safety Risks: What Parents Need to Know
3Epistemic Risks: Teaching Children to See Through Synthetic Media
4Cognitive Risks: The Dependency Problem
5Privacy and Data Risks
6Social and Emotional Risks
7The Emergency Conversation
8Chapter Summary and Key Takeaways
9Reflection Questions for Parents
10References

2,948 words, about 13 minutes to read. Part Five of Raising AI-Ready Children.